“What was it you were wanting to discuss?” Mara asked, plumping down onto one of the pale green sofas that flanked the fireplace. Her coppery curls reflected the firelight as if born from it.
I looked around but still saw no sign of the resident ghost. “Is there a way to talk without your houseguest hearing us?” I asked.
Mara looked puzzled. “Well, yes. Why?”
“I don’t want to say where he can listen in, but as I need your help and—in a way—his, I’d like to talk here and now, if we can.”
Mara lifted her shoulders in a resigned shrug. “All right. How much time do you want?”
“I think thirty minutes will be enough to explain it.”
“That’s easy enough.” She sat up very straight and began muttering under her breath in lilting musical phrases accompanied by the gleaming blue of magic that she caught on her fingertips and painted on the air in curling, vinelike shapes.
As the creepers of energy took shape, she rose from her seat and began to walk around the outside of the twin couches counterclockwise, still singing a little and passing her hands through the air, leaving gleaming trails of blue. The bramble followed her, growing around the couches faster than kudzu. She circled the couches three times, and the sparkling shapes of magic grew higher and denser with each pass until they were more than head high and beginning to arch over us as if they grew on some invisible arbor. Mara made one last gesture and the magic arbor closed over our heads. I heard a distant bubbling and murmuring, as if the magic were alive and talking to itself as we sat beneath it.
“All right, then,” Mara said, sitting back down. “What has Albert done?”
“I’m not sure what he’s done or what he intends, but I know he’s been up to something and he may have information that will help me with a problem.”
Mara leaned back and made herself comfortable, ready to listen. “Go on.”
“A few days ago I was brought a zombie, for lack of a better word—literally a walking corpse. How it was animated I’m still not entirely sure and that’s less important than this—when I broke it down, there were two spirits in the shell of the body. I’ve talked to Carlos about this and there should be only one. One of the entities seemed to be the spirit that had inhabited the body in life—and that was a while ago, considering the state of decomposition. But the other was Albert, and I’m pretty sure he hasn’t been in a body of his own in a while.”
Mara was appalled. “Heavens, no! Albert animating a corpse? Are you sure? I wouldn’t have thought him capable—he’s not terribly strong.”
“But he is unusually strong-willed.”
“Is he?”
“You don’t think so? He comes and goes, he moves things as big and heavy as Ben’s desk, he eggs Brian into all sorts of trouble, he got me to follow him into the Grey once before I even knew I could do it…”
Mara bit her lip a moment in thought. “Yes… He does have an unusual activity level. He can do all that, yet he never speaks to anyone but Brian—I’m not even sure he speaks, so much as plants a suggestion, which is rather a strong action of itself. But it would take a necromancer to animate a corpse. Or some very black magic.”
“I don’t think Albert animated the corpse,” I corrected. “I think the restless soul of the body is what kept it moving—although something else was keeping the body intact and causing the original spirit to be imprisoned in it. Albert just went along for the ride I think. Then I saw a memory loop of him in a speakeasy under Pioneer Square and that got me thinking that Albert may know more about the creature that caused the zombie. The walking corpse is connected to that creature, as are a spate of recent deaths of the homeless in the historic district. It also seems likely this creatures been loose in the area in the historic past, including the time since Prohibition, when Albert died. I need to talk to him about that creature. And just because I’m like that, I want to know what he was doing riding a zombie at all, but especially one of these zombies.”
“And you think he’s up to no good or you wouldn’t have wanted this privacy spell.”
“Yeah, I do. I just don’t see how there’s a benign explanation for what he was doing. And I’ll need your help to question him. I may be able to talk to him and I may be able to hold him, but I’m not sure I can force him and I can’t do all three at once. You made a tangle for me to capture the poltergeist with. Can you do something like that to hold Albert while I try to make him answer my questions?”
“Compelling a ghost seems a little extreme…”
“Mara, I know you and Ben think he’s a good guy, but I don’t. I think there’s something unpleasant about Albert and that he’s got an agenda separate from yours. Its not just my personal grudge. Whatever he’s up to may not be bad for you and your family, but I doubt it’s good. I haven’t met a revenant yet who thought the ends didn’t justify the means.”
“True… They don’t really think like we do—when they think at all.”
“You and Ben know that the willful ones are manipulative by nature, and Albert is willful.”
“You could try asking Carlos for help,” Mara suggested reluctantly.
I shook my head. “Carlos and Cameron absented themselves on this, and I wouldn’t want them involved anyway, now that I consider it. I think you and I can do this ourselves. Especially since I don’t want to pay whatever price Carlos would be asking for the service. And this is your house and I won’t be a bad guest in it by attacking and interrogating your pet ghost. But I have to talk to Albert.”
“Pet!” Mara objected.
“You treat him like he’s part guard dog and part favorite uncle.”
Mara frowned. “Do I…?” she murmured, and I knew she was reviewing the past at high speed, thinking hard about every interaction she’d had with Albert.
“I didn’t come to accuse you of anything,” I said, bringing her mind back to the problem at hand. “I just need to talk to Albert so that he has to answer. Can you help me do that?”
Mara glanced around. “I’d better work fast. This spell’s almost used up. A tangle won’t work so well this time—he’ll see it coming. I’ll have to use a net. This shan’t be fun and we’ll have to do it right here, since I can start the spell under this one, where he can’t see it. If I cast too many spells, he’ll be suspicious—he’s always interested in my magic and comes poking in to see what I’m up to.” She slid off the couch and dug in her apron pocket for a bit of chalk, beginning to make marks on the floor between the two sofas. She jerked her head up to stare at me. “I hope I shan’t regret this.”
“So do I.”
“When I say so, go upstairs and tell Ben we’ll need privacy in the living room for a while. He’ll understand and stay out. And he’ll keep Brian out, too, if the boy hasn’t gone to sleep yet. Albert will probably follow you down, so when you come back here well see what happens.”
I nodded and she went back to chalking diagrams that began to glow a dim gold as she advanced. When she chalked one that flickered to black, she sent me to talk to Ben. As I stepped through the fading blue vines of the privacy spell, they fizzed and fell away. Mara put one of the afghans from the couch over the markings on the floor and remained whispering over it for a moment as I left the room and went up the musically creaking stairs.
I could hear some murmurs from the room off the middle of the upstairs hall. I assumed that was Brian’s room and tapped on the door.
“Come in!” Ben called back.
I opened the door and took a step inside. The room looked like fairyland after an explosion. Toys and books and clothes were everywhere in the room that was painted with pale streamers of blue, green, and violet on one wall, trees and meadowlands on the next. Tiny faces peeked from corners and hid in the grass of the field—including a less-pleasant face that glowered at me from behind Ben’s shoulder: Albert. I ignored him and gazed around the room. A merry ceramic sun cast twisted copper rays over the railed bed where a giggling Brian lay listening to Ben read a story from a huge, leather-bound book. Brian looked toward the door and laughed, waving at me. “Harpa!”